True Blue Seeing Red in Orange County : Campaign: GOP walls shake as Clinton converts trumpet their support for a (gasp!) Democrat. But the party faithful are outraged by the rallying rebels.

COSTA MESA — Here is the Alamo, the Maginot Line and the Ft. Knox of the Republican Party.

For half a century and more, Democratic presidential candidates--if they were ill-advised enough to venture into Orange County at all--moved in timidly and left tracelessly, like low tide at Laguna, like the water lapping faintly at the pilings of the Huntington Beach pier.

The Republicans of Orange County, legion and loyal, withstood them all. No one since F.D.R.--and his patrician charm worked only once, in 1936--turned them from their purpose. Truman, Kennedy, L.B.J.--Orange County would have none of them.

Here were thousands of reliable GOP votes, deep and generous GOP pockets. Here was adoration when their man won (Ronald Reagan, conquering hero of 1980 and 1984) and succor when he lost (Richard M. Nixon, disgraced and wounded by the Watergate scandal, came home to San Clemente in 1974).

To be an optimistic Democrat in Orange County, wrote local historian Jim Sleeper, one needs a hide like a rhinoceros.

Thursday night, rhino-hided Orange County Democratic Chairman Howard Adler gazed upon a crowd of more than 18,000 gathered at the Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa. “Remember this date: On Oct. 22, 1992, the Orange Curtain falls!” he screamed.

Here, an optimistic Bill Clinton crossed the Republicans’ Rubicon.

“I remember the first time I came to Orange County. They said Democrats were an endangered species,” Clinton said when he took the stage shortly before 9 p.m. Taking note of the county’s lagging economic performance--and clearly pitching his message to the majority of its residents--he added: “I said to myself, these are not Republicans, these are Americans . . . We’re going to help lift America up together.”

To share something under a half-hour with Clinton--and seemingly every Democratic candidate in California--thousands had waited for hours outside the amphitheater.

“God bless America, land that I love,” sang the little girls and boys of Kids Are Music, in front of the venue. “These are the days of miracles and wonders,” sang Paul Simon, over the loudspeaker inside.

Edna Bradley walked here with her homemade “Republicans for Choice” sign over her shoulder. She has lived in Costa Mesa since 1968; has voted Republican since the second Eisenhower Administration. It took George Bush to move her hand from the GOP lever.

“I think it’s just awful what Bush did to the Supreme Court. I want my daughter to have a choice. Almost all my friends are for choice, even the Catholics.”

A hundred years ago, Grover Cleveland’s happy partisans staged the first and “unquestionably” the last torchlight parade of Democrats “in the sovereign republic of Orange County,” wrote historian Sleeper.

Six weeks ago, Scott Lay and Paul Mitchell were two guys sitting out in the quad with a card table and Clinton buttons. On Thursday, they led a parade of 300 Orange Coast College students to the Clinton rally.

They marshaled the likes of Catherine Llarena and Tiffany Tung, up until dawn Thursday plastering Costa Mesa with Clinton-Gore signs, dodging Young Americans for Freedom who pulled down the posters, said Llarena.

This is their first presidential election, and when Llarena called home to let her father know what she was doing--her father, with a quarter of a century in the military--”he said he’s voting for Clinton!”

However Clinton ultimately fares here, Republicans will not go gentle into any good night. Kathy Benning of Mission Viejo held the Maginot Line for her President, holding an orange “Bush Country” sign opposite the queue of Clinton voters at the amphitheater.

“We think (Clinton) has a lot of nerve.”

She brightened. “But only in America, though, can a Democrat come into Bush country.”

Mark Mann’s sign, made by his wife, advised “Go Home Slick Willie.” Clinton, he felt, was wearing out his threadbare welcome on something close to sacred soil.

“It seems flagrant to me,” Mann complained. “(Clinton) was here once. He established his issues the first time. He’s just coming back to give the conservatives here a slap in the face.”

The man who invited Clinton here last December--”The Republican waffle,” sneered Mann--is Roger Johnson, president and CEO of Western Digital, a Republican then and now, but an Orange County man for Clinton.

His Clinton fund-raiser rocked the county’s pastel stucco walls. He took a bow onstage Thursday night. Earlier, he said, puckishly, that the Democrats he’s met “really aren’t all that sinister--pretty good people as a matter of fact. . . . haven’t been bitten by one of them yet.”

Johnson’s disaffection is more profound than glib. Orange County, built on real estate, moated off from the urban plagues of Los Angeles, has been suffering. Plunging home equity, rising foreclosures, nearly 34,000 jobs lost in one year.

Dolly Ahrens works in an Orange County soup kitchen. Her clients wait in line for food; she waited in line for Clinton.

“I know this is a conservative area, but conservatism doesn’t count for much when you can’t feed your family.”